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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Limitedclear FM - You can't make a railroad a monopoly by saying so. The railroad market share is effectively policed by trucks and other railroad competition unlike the electric or gas utility which has no effective competition. Sioux City is also served by BNSF and Baard is free to nergotiate with them. Of course, given their track record with the UP the result is likely to be the same... LC [/quote] Sioux City is also served by CN. If neither of the three want to *donate* $2-3 million in track infrastructure, would it still be fair to blame the railroad(s) for the deal falling apart? [/quote] Of course not. Unless these guys at Baard are willing to commit to moving 2,000+ carloads annually which is probably realistic IF they were actually to use rail and reach the full 55,000,000 gals of production they say is coming. For example 1,500 inbound carloads and 500 outbound. Note also that my earlier calculation was flawed in that I used the incorrect car size of 20,000 gals/car instead of the actual which is apparently 30,000gals according to more recent articles. So in that scenario there would be approximately 1,834 carloads of outbound ethanol (note that I have not applied the customer discount or a reduction for car availability so actual numbers would probably be much smaller especially early on). Say 600 actual. Plus inbound unit trains of corn. Probably 75 car units totalling perhaps 1,800 cars annually. So, 2,400 cars per year. At that rate one would expect that 100% payback of the actual investment (without accounting for interest, carrying costs, taxes, etc) would take just over 5 years. Now ther deal would become a lot more interesting to the RR. Unfortunately, without Baard coming to the table and making such a written commitment it won't happen. And as we have seen, they and their developers apparently haven't even figured out who to call yet... LC
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